


touch no thing of war

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Comfort/Angst, Consent Issues, Corruption, Dubcon Cuddling, Emotional Manipulation, Hair-petting, It’s definitely one of those two, Late to the prompt party but here nonetheless, M/M, Non-Consensual Cuddling, Potentially Suggestive Themes, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Praise, Season 3 AU, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, due to the
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27361105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: It hadn’t even been that bad a plan on all their parts, the idea of using Jon against him – both loyalty test to assuage the human staff’s suspicions and attempt to weaponize the monster among them at once.(Elias picks up the pieces, of course.)
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 23
Kudos: 131
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020, Jonelias Week 2020, Rusty Kink





	touch no thing of war

**Author's Note:**

> I have two favorite ships in this entire canon, and I am quite frankly terrible at being a person who creates content for either of them. Even revealing this is harrowing; I do not feel safe openly liking things. But there were very good prompts, so here’s… this.
> 
> (Incalculable thanks to everyone involved in talking me through my internalized homophobia enough to write at all. As you have probably gathered, this one was rough even by my usual tumultuous standards.)
> 
> Stacking prompts is helpful to me! This is a very, very belated day 2: manipulation and/or caretaking, expanding on a self-fill [on the kinkmeme](https://rusty-kink.dreamwidth.org/1380.html?thread=539748#cmt539748), and my Gentle Giant fill for the BTB prompt “Sympathetic Villain”. (In more ways than one!)

When Elias pulled Jon back into his lap he went easily, all protest exhausted, falling ungently against him with his head landing on Elias’s shoulder. Much more between him and the attempt at taking some residual initiative and Elias would have had to look into his mind just to know that was the idea, as opposed to only intercepting him before he hit the floor. As it was, Jon’s mind was very quiet, all the fight drained out of him and not yet replaced with panic. He was trying, yes, but Elias had no intention of letting him get very far.

Jon made a stifled, pained noise that didn’t even slightly approach words, and Elias hushed him, not for the first time. Hazarded bringing one hand up to the back of Jon’s head to encourage him to turn his face a bit, take the pressure off the bridge of his nose and press his closed, still-aching eyes against the side of Elias’s neck. He went, not obligingly but went, and even with the intermittent shuddering the tension began to leach out of him by increments. Elias barely pushed, just let the white noise drowning Jon’s attempts at complex thought wash over him and stroked in gentle, insistent circles over Jon’s scalp, the back of his neck.

It hadn’t even been that bad a plan on all their parts, the idea of using Jon against him – both loyalty test to assuage the human staff’s suspicions and attempt to weaponize the monster among them at once. Both functions decisively failed, of course, but Hussain especially Elias couldn’t have faulted for believing betrayal to be a genuine possibility, even if she hadn’t also played into his hands beyond expectations in what she did with it. Nor – especially now, with how abruptly clear forcing such a confrontation had made things for which he’d budgeted still allowing Jon personal conflict – could Elias really fault the Archive for having allowed himself to be used. If anything, it all was neater than Elias had ever expected, for the failure to be such self-demonstrating proof he was fit for purpose.

Jon still had his hands raised defensively, at least from a technical perspective, wrists crossed by how he’d folded in on himself, arms pinned uselessly between their bodies. It didn’t have to be useless; he was not being physically stopped from pushing against Elias’s chest, shoving himself away, from taking advantage of the continuing lack of any actual physical restraint. But he wasn’t, and didn’t, nonetheless.

“Shh,” Elias said, again, when Jon’s shoulders started to shake harder, the pain in his eyes having receded enough for him to coherently tell himself he deserved it and fight any element of comfort accordingly. “It’s all right, Jon. It was never actually going to work. You’ll be all right.”

At that Jon did shove one palm against Elias in weak protest, but just as soon that arm went limp, falling to his side and leaving Jon curled slightly closer than before for his efforts. Given how close they were in height this ought to have been uncomfortable, but instead Jon fit so exactly into available negative space that Elias couldn’t know if it was merely a temporary feature of having rendered him this pliant. He expected he’d find out, though, one way or another, now that there had been a first time.

“I _am_ sorry,” he said quietly, after another moment. “That whole display was utterly unnecessary.”

There was loathing there, of course, a worn-out routine sort of thing operating on reflex. Bleeding off of Jon but barely, as if he was too exhausted to manage feeling, let alone to pin down anything to which he could address it.

Elias took pity on him, then, a bit, enough to lean into Jon’s mind for him so they could discuss the objections he couldn’t coherently vocalize. Mostly because the tenor of his accusations now that he was managing to make any was so typical as to be funny. “No, Jon,” he said; gently, so as not to laugh at him for it. “I’m not torturing you. I am not doing anything to harm you, in fact.”

It was not unsound logic on Jon’s part, he was willing to admit. Especially given that it already came naturally to Jon not just to reject comfort but to reframe it as something sinister, just in case he might otherwise find himself accepting anything like it. If it had been Elias’s _fault_ he now found himself incapacitated and largely incoherent, any improvement in that respect was safe to dismiss as a glorified rounding error and Jon could have a villain to hate beyond himself besides. As far as motivated reasoning went, Elias had seen much worse; and recently, no less. 

That wasn’t a reason to let it stand, of course; but it reminded him to be patient, that this was a matter worth patience. “You’re not in pain right now because of anything I’m doing to you, and you haven’t done yourself any permanent damage.”

Jon wished he had, of course, in that emphatic but half-hearted way he had of doing it; his appetite for self-destruction was reliably theoretical. At first largely because he hadn’t been presented with extreme enough situations to learn otherwise, but by now, Elias thought, it was well established how enough of Jon to matter would never turn knowingly toward oblivion, rash gestures aside. Elias had, admittedly, staked a great deal on that assessment on his part – on his knowing Jon at least an order of magnitude better than Jon knew himself, really – and had yet to fully see it through, but any expectation that he’d be surprised had largely been crushed somewhere around the first time Jon knowingly came back to him. Which both of them were now considering in some form, albeit for very different reasons.

“Free will doesn’t mean you can choose to do the impossible, Jon. You miscalculating what you’re currently capable of is just a learning curve. And this is something you would have understood eventually, but it was cruel of them to force the issue. I didn’t intend for you to find out like this.” It was not his particular gift in any way to force people to face what they didn’t want to have known said with their own mouths, of course; that was what defined Jon himself; so Elias didn’t ask, but said, mildly, “You’re starting to feel better, at any rate,” because Jon was, and liable to make himself worse again somehow if left to his own devices. 

What _issue_ , Jon mouthed without moving his head, face briefly flickering into a snarl that even Elias couldn’t see but would hardly have needed to. He was thinking of himself as determined not to be distracted, as if it were relevant; as if there was anywhere left for him to go.

“You know what empowers you,” Elias said, patiently, noting how even that slight a reference to Beholding was enough to make Jon freeze between flinching with denial and nervous preening at what he considered, if on a level he thought he hated, to be flattery. There were just the barest seeds of something like enough to love to do its work, there. Jon had never been good enough at self-denial to become someone who might have uprooted them before now. Not enough joys in his life to have practiced it. “You know the master that we share. Why would Its powers ever serve against Its own ends? I…” The reasons for that pause on Elias’s part were, at least, familiar to him, expected, enough to exist but quickly be moved past. “I would be doing awful work if you could call on the Eye to stop me, Jon, really. None of this is anything you didn’t already know. That’s why it’s cruel of your… allies to have forced you to test those limits regardless.”

The part that Elias couldn’t help but admit delighted him, enough to humor Jon with easily-given answers this once, was how little surprise there was left for Jon in the confirmation, the extent to which he did, in fact, already know. The ways he’d tried to warn his associates, even, with just his barest intuitive grasp on the matter, and been ignored. He was sure it would come to Jon sooner rather than later that if Hussain and the rest hadn’t ignored him, taken reluctance for cowardice and complicity, they would still – however tenuously – have one monster on their side. That he’d told them, insofar as he could, to keep him out of any direct confrontation, and not one of them had trusted that Jon might have a real reason why. 

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’ve done very well. That was a formidable use of your power—” Jon gave an almost full-body shiver at that, though the level of unconscious reflex meant that even Elias couldn’t quite know whether that was coincidence, the praise, or his having shifted to just barely using his fingernails as he carded through Jon’s hair. “—and if you were up against something other than me, you’d likely have succeeded. I’m very pleased; you should be, too.”

“Well, I’m n…” Jon said, tried to say, his first attempt to speak collapsing in on itself instead; brief and self-inflicted panicked gasps followed for a moment, swallowing even his stutter, but equilibrium stole up on him soon enough. Elias had taken it upon himself to help a bit: the tips of his fingers back to circling against Jon’s scalp, the back of his head, grounding him appropriately in a present he still didn’t want to know. “I, I’m not,” Jon said again. Self-fulfillingly determined to believe it. Significantly less determined to do anything about his hand having migrated up to Elias’s shoulder, the new position leaning more of Jon’s body directly into him. 

“I know.” Elias, not without some brief consideration of the risk, turned his head just enough to press his closed lips against Jon’s temple, if only barely. And the way Jon shifted forward in turn with the resulting arch of his throat, wordless, then, was somewhere between nuzzling and falling. “You have time,” he said, and watched as Jon found that even in his mind any more resistance had escaped him.

**Author's Note:**

> “Apparently Elias’s type in men is ‘wants to make me stop petting him but is powerless to do so :3’”
> 
> I am moderately confused to have gotten the title from [this tweet](https://twitter.com/drmysterian/status/1250835354346815489?s=21).
> 
> Comments are nice! They help, often. It’s a whole thing.


End file.
